Best-selling author of the Commissario Brunetti mystery novels, Donna Leon has written a fascinating memoir, Wandering through Life, which is aptly described as "a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humor" about her life which she maintains "has rather more happened to her than has been planned."

Leon begins the memoir by sharing with the reader her family origins, which are rooted in Germany and Latin America. She was a child of the 1940s and 1950s in New Jersey, and speaks at some length about the times she and her older brother spent on her maternal grandfather's farm in New Jersey, which he had developed into a diverse business enterprise, hiring seasonal employees (i.e., Irish immigrant men to whom he offered employment) to help him till the soil, raise the chickens and pigs who would later be slaughtered for meat, and sell other produce to the public that was generated yearly. I especially enjoyed Leon's description of her mother, as well as her telling of the influence her parents had on the lives of herself and her brother. They were not demanding parents who expected their children to aspire for specific careers in, say, medicine or law. But rather to be self-reliant and live lives that matched their own inclinations.

So, it was that Leon, after living through her 20s and early 30s as a student much absorbed in academia and travel, took on teaching stints in pre-revolutionary Iran, China (during the late 1970s), Saudi Arabia, and Italy - where from the early 1980s, she taught English literature for a time to U.S. military personnel on an Army base, and later settled in Venice.

Leon speaks on many subjects that have piqued her interest through the years. Chief among her passions is opera, which I remember her speaking about at some length at a reading she gave about a decade ago in a local bookstore. I found her to be very engaging and the manner in which she spoke about the writing process made me feel, perhaps, that some day, I, too, could write a novel or two.

In the memoir's final chapter (entitled "Miss Brill" so named after a character in a Katherine Mansfield short story), Leon relates to the reader the revelation she experienced one day while working in her garden and found a task that once came easily to her, now difficult to do on account of age. It made me think of some of the physical challenges this year that, I, as a late stage Baby Boomer, experienced when I developed age-related lumbar issues and an arthritic hip. The following remarks made by Leon resonated very deeply with me: "... when we can't do something we once did with ease, we can't look away from it and pretend it didn't happen. ... As we approach the other end of life, ... , society washes its hands of us. Suddenly, there are no laws that will protect us from our own reckless choices. The same societies that do not hesitate to interfere in the private lives of people near the beginning of their lives refuse to accept responsibility when the same people are nearing the other end."

Wandering through Life is a delightful and engaging memoir that can be easily read in a few hours or over a couple of days. I recommend it to anyone who is a Donna Leon fan.